China’s Lost Connection to the Global South: A Fanonian Reading of Yu Dafu and the Colonized Status of May Fourth Literature in the Japanese Empire

Abstract

China’s transition to modernity in the early twentieth century was inseparable from the culture of Imperial Japan, as Japan-educated Chinese students formed the nexus of the progressive intellectual circle—the so-called May Fourth youths—who led efforts of nation-building and modernization in Republican China. Whereas May Fourth literature is appreciated for its role in founding modern Chinese nationalism, the fundamental control of Imperial Japan over May Fourth discourse and China’s semicolonial status in the Japanese Empire blur the boundary between national and colonized literature. This chapter addresses the historical reasons behind the lack of recognition of May Fourth literature as colonized literature that is connected to the colonized experience of the Global South. Using Frantz Fanon’s portrayal of the colonized psyche to analyze Yu Dafu’s depiction of being Chinese in Japan, this chapter illustrates the comparability between the Chinese experience in the Japanese Empire and the Antillean black experience in the French Empire. This comparison explores the application of theories originating from Latin America to fill a conceptual gap in Chinese studies and the possibility for a transpacific dialogue on China and Latin America’s shared pasts of colonialism that has been suppressed by Western-inspired racial schism dividing China and the Global South.